Green-collar jobs

For the past three years, Tammy Leatherbury, a resident of Roosevelt, Wash., in Klickitat County, has worked as a truck driver — first long-haul, then garbage. “I was making a good living, but I was bored out of my mind and gaining weight like you wouldn’t believe,” says Leatherbury, who is 45 and had a prior career as a waitress. So when she heard on her CB radio about a new wind technician training program at Columbia Gorge Community College (CGCC) in The Dalles, Ore., she jumped at the chance to do “something that’s physical but mental too.”

On Wednesday, June 13, Leatherbury completed the six-month pilot program. “They put me to work on Thursday,” she says. “I knew there would be a huge amount of opportunity.” Today, Leatherbury spends her weekdays atop 263-foot GE (NYSE: GE) wind turbines at the Big Horn wind farm in Klickitat County, where she works as a member of the warranty group for Granite Services, a contractor for GE Energy. The only female technician at Big Horn, Leatherbury earns more than she was making after three years “driving truck,” and, for the first time in her life, has vacation pay and a 401K. “This is a dream come true,” she says.

Leatherbury is one of a growing number of workers to benefit from “green-collar” jobs programs: workforce training initiatives targeting renewable energy, green building, sustainable agriculture and other green industries. Although there are no comprehensive statistics tracking the number of such programs, green business and education experts say a surge in private investment, combined with alternative energy mandates, is fueling the growth of green-collar jobs programs around the country. One report recently released by the American Solar Energy Society estimates that renewable energy and energy efficiency industries currently generate 8.5 million jobs and nearly $1 trillion in revenue. The report estimates the industries impact could grow to 40 million U.S. jobs and $4.5 trillion by 2030.

“With new renewable energy standards, industry is going to be hiring people like crazy,” says Roger Ebbage, the director of energy management programs at Lane Community College in Eugene, Ore., which launched a renewable energy technician option in 2002.

California is already “offering the bank” for renewable energy practitioners, Ebbage says, and there are six solar contractors in Eugene alone. “We didn’t want to lose the opportunity to make solar part of the construction vocabulary,” he says. “The picture is just rosy.”

Sponsored by community colleges, labor unions and nonprofit organizations, many green training initiatives aim to close the gap between the wealth created by burgeoning sustainable industries and the hundreds of thousands of low-income and unemployed citizens in this country. “We can put a whole generation to work retrofitting and rebooting a clean energy economy,” says Van Jones, president of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and a founding member of the Oakland Apollo Alliance, a coalition of unions, green businesses and environmental groups.

With $250,000 in seed money from the Oakland City Council, the Alliance recently launched the nation’s first “Green Jobs Corps.” A 21st century version of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs and Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, the initiative will target the city’s low-income young people with training and networking programs. “Greening the economy provides an opportunity to fight poverty and pollution at the same time,” Jones says.

Inspired by the Oakland project, Congresswoman Hilda Solis (D-CA) and Congressman John Tierney (D-MA) introduced the Green Jobs Act of 2007, which would allocate $125 million toward job training for about 35,000 U.S. workers in green and clean industries. The local and national programs both underscore the unique professional growth opportunities linked to the emerging green-collar category. “We want to take the traditional blue-collar base and skill it up to clean energy industry wages,” Jones says. “We are creating green pathways out of poverty.”

According to the Cleantech Network, venture capitalists invested $2.9 billion in clean technology in 2006, up 80 percent from 2005. The organic foods sector grew 16 percent to $13.8 billion in U.S. consumer sales in 2005, according to the Nutrition Business Journal. Green building construction and services is now a $12 billion industry, according to a recent article in Forbes magazine. Government incentives for sustainable businesses are also multiplying. As of July 2007, 20 states had adopted renewable energy standards and five had adopted biofuels mandates.

As industry and policy go green, the demand for workers skilled in the new trades is increasing dramatically. “I’ve been in sustainable development for a few years, and it’s always been a challenge to find subcontractors who know how to install or build with green products,” says Jyl DeHaven, a developer in Fort Worth, Texas, who recently launched Green Collar Vets, an organization that trains veterans in environmentally friendly installation and construction techniques. “I thought: ‘Here we have an amazing, quality group of people who know how to work hard and need jobs,’” DeHaven says. “Why not bring them into an industry that seemed to be skyrocketing?”

Paul Hess is among U.S. veterans finding civilian employment through Jyl DeHaven's Green Collar Vets program.

 

 Last June, Paul Hess, a 23-year-old former Marine Corps sergeant and Iraq war veteran, spent three days in Albuquerque, N.M., training to become a certified installer for American Clay Earth Plaster, a green building material. Green Collar Vets paid for the training, and Hess now works for Going Green USA, a distribution and installation company also founded by DeHaven. “When I was a kid, all I knew about green was throwing my soda bottle into a recycling bin,” Hess says. “But green construction is going to have a lot of opportunities. And a lot of the products interest me.”

Green Collar Vets invests about $5,000 per veteran to cover training and two months’ salary to help clients achieve economic self-sufficiency, according to DeHaven. “We want to build career paths,” says DeHaven, who refers to green-collar jobs as a “step forward” from traditional blue-collar labor. “This work isn’t mass-produced,” she says. “It’s about quality and craftsmanship.”

Wind energy technician jobs require experience in mechanics, electronics, hydrology and “all the multiples in between,” says Shane Kirkland, a Vestas site manager for the Bigelow Canyon wind farm in Sherman County, Ore. “It’s been very difficult for us to find employees.”

Kirkland, who started out as a technician himself, says Vestas offered jobs to six graduates of the Columbia Gorge Community College wind program, with a pay scale ranging from $14.50 to $22.50 per hour. The company also “relies heavily” on a wind turbine technician program at Iowa Lakes Community College in Estherville, Iowa, Kirkland says.

CGCC launched the wind energy technician program with the help of two grants totaling $93,350 from the Oregon governor’s office, says Susan Wolff, chief academic officer of Columbia Gorge Community College. The college teamed up with Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), the Bonneville Power Administration and wind energy companies — which supplied the college with onsite turbines — to create the new curriculum, which is also designed to prepare students for an array of renewable energy technician positions. “Twenty-four people enrolled in the pilot program, 24 completed the program and 24 have jobs,” Wolff says. “Industry is desperate for employees.”

Investment in clean energy projects is already reaping enormous dividends for urban and rural communities. According to a recent report published by the Renewable Northwest Project, “Wind Power and Economic Development: Real Examples from the Pacific Northwest,” the region’s seven wind farms are generating an average of $5.79 million to $6.75 million in annual property tax revenues and have created about 72 permanent maintenance and technician jobs.

Big Horn Wind Farm, Klickitat County.

In Klickitat Country, where the unemployment rate was more than 10 percent two years ago, “wind farm jobs are big news,” says Michael Canon, the county’s economic development director. The Big Horn wind farm created about 170 jobs, about 24 of which are permanent positions, Canon says. The project is also expected to net the county about $1 million a year in taxes.

“This is an economically distressed county,” says Canon. “Now the hotels are full, the restaurants are busy. There’s a lot of excitement.” Two other wind farms are planned or under construction, and the unemployment rate has declined from 7.8 percent in 2005 to 6.4 percent, he says. As job growth continues, green-collar jobs advocates say the challenge is to ensure that unskilled workers — the majority of whom were excluded from the country’s biotech and Internet booms — are not left behind by the emerging sustainable economy. “Currently, the green economy is led by young people who are hiring their friends in the dorm,” Jones says. “Entrepreneurs do not have the social connections to a low skilled pool of workers.”

This “green divide” is of strategic, as well as social importance, Jones says. An “alliance between polluters and the poor” has derailed many clean energy initiatives, he says, citing as an example the defeat of California’s Proposition 87, which would have taxed fossil fuel extraction. The measure failed as a result of an aggressive advertising campaign by the oil industry, which convinced poor consumers they would be forced to absorb the added costs. “To successfully green the economy we have to minimize the pain and maximize the gain for poor people,” Jones says.

In January 2008, the Oakland Apollo Alliance will begin training about two dozen workers at Peralta Community Colleges, the area’s community college system. In addition to technical training in areas such as biofuels and solar panel installation, the program will include financial literacy classes and networking opportunities to help clients develop business skills and meet employers. Green-collar jobs are secure jobs, Jones says. “Solar panel installation is not the kind of job you can outsource to China,” he says. “That work has to be done in the U.S.”

Other green training programs are providing micro-entrepreneurship opportunities for Latino workers, who have traditionally labored in the agriculture and landscaping industries with little opportunity for professional advancement. For example, the Salinas, Calif.-based Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA) provides marketing, legal and technical training for farm workers and aspiring farmers who want to grow and sell crops. In 2006, two clients purchased their own farms and two were able to lease farmland, according to Gary Peterson, ALBA’s development director.

Verde employees learn about native plant landscaping.

At Verde, a native plant nursery and job training organization founded by Hacienda Community Development Corporation in Portland, one part-time and three full-time landscapers are paid about $12 per hour, plus benefits, to work on projects ranging from bioswales managed by the Bureau of Environmental Services to habitat restoration at Smith & Bybee Lakes. “We take them from no landscaping skill set to maintaining specific installations, propagating plants and understanding how a business operates,” says Alan Hipólito, Verde’s director.

Hacienda chose a native plant nursery because “it made sense to focus our energy on a fastgrowing sector in the sustainable economy,” Hipólito says. Echoing Jones, Hipólito says providing low-income workers with job training and career opportunities fills an important gap in the development of green industries. “So far, the sustainable economy isn’t making any money for poor folks,” he says, noting that Portland’s new biofuels mandate, which requires a 5 percent biodiesel or 10 percent ethanol blend, “doesn’t talk about who is going to get the jobs or workforce development.”

But if the notion of a green jobs corps is still in its infancy, the growing number of initiatives — both big and small — suggests workforce training may be the next big thing in sustainable development. The National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, for example, is lobbying for the inclusion of a Rural Entrepreneurs and Micro-enterprise Assistance Program in the 2007 Farm Bill; the organization is also calling for $75 million in annual grants for rural small business education and technical assistance.

Meanwhile, people who are enrolled in such programs say they are reaping the benefits. “I show my wife before and after pictures of green streets, and tell her I am working for clean rivers,” says Martin Armenta, one of Verde’s employees. In a couple of years, Armenta says, he hopes to start his own business. “Now, I still need more learning,” he says.

Leatherbury, who won a scholarship to the American Wind Energy Association’s June 2007 conference in Los Angeles, says the opportunities that have followed her wind technician training have been “just fabulous.”

“It’s like jumping off in front of a huge wave that’s starting up,” Leatherbury says. “We should be growing our children to do these jobs.”